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Domesday
Book, our oldest and most famous public record, describes the condition
of England south of the river Tees in 1066 and 1086.

Ordered to
investigate ‘how the country was occupied, and with what sort of people
... how much each had ... and how much it was worth’, the Conqueror’s
commissionersconducted their survey so thoroughly that ‘not one ox, nor
one cow,’ was left unrecorded.

As with the Last Judgement, all were
called to account in Domesday Book; hence the name, Domesday, or Doomsday, from the Anglo-Saxon word doom, meaning 'law' or 'judgement'. Like the Last Judgement, there could be no appeal from Domesday.

The Domesday Inquest has bequeathed an unparalleled body
of evidence. For 99 per cent of the 15,000 places named there, Domesday
provides the first recorded description of their human and natural
resources. The history of most English villages begins with Domesday Book, as does the continuous history
of the English countryside, of the landowning classes and of the peasantry.
On the economy and taxation, military service, other public obligations, administrative structures,
government, legal customs and practice, place-names and personal names and many
more miscellaneous topics, Domesday Book is the primary source for several
centuries of English history. The bulk of the evidence for the settlement of the English in the fifth century and of the Vikings in the ninth comes from Domesday Book. It is overwhelmingly the most important source for the impact of the Norman Conquest, perhaps the most significant divide in English history..

Domesday Explorer
is software which allows you to explore Great Domesday, searching an updated Phillimore English translation. The text has been tagged with over 500,000 codes, and a powerful search engine lets you easily find entries of interest, map them, display the facsimile and the translation, along with indexes of places and names.

AHRC Project

The AHRC Project(2007) produced a freely available electronic and fully encoded text of Great and Little Domesday, a database of major Domesday statistics for all people and
places, and a scholarly commentary on all matters of interest in the 25,000
entries. A second edition (2010) revised some of this data and added a file of identifications - IDs.rtf - of the lords of 12,000 manors named in Domesday Book only by their Christian names.

Open Domesday

http://opendomesday.org/ is the first free online copy of Domesday Book, with search and mapping of Domesday places, images of the facsimile and entry level statistics. The site was built as a non-profit
project by
Anna Powell-Smith, in collaboration with the research and development team.

Downloads and other materialSome downloads are provided for offline use of the material here, and there is an update for Domesday Explorer. (version 1.1) For further reading, see the Bibliography, and for more Domesday resources on the web see Links.